Let’s face it, if you are in the video business today…you have to upgrade to an efficient HD camera(s), trust me…your video will look a whole lot better…HD and SD…And your clients will love it! Okay give me an example.

CASE 1: Background, I have two Sony PD170’s … used them all the time for most of my video shoots. Now I have the Sony HVR-V1U…great camera…At first, I would only use it for “HD Shoots”…duh…All I had to do was use this superior camera in SD and get even better video than the PD170’s. Well the light went on the day I shot my video of FIRST CHOICE CARPETS. You can see the video at http://www.bobcummings.tv. Actually you can see a lot of video on that site. Okay, back to First Choice. They needed to have a group shot of about 15 employees screaming out their slogan. I had the Sony HD camera up in the second floor office looking down on the group. I hooked up a mike to the PD170, next to the group on the floor out of camera frame, and let the tape roll to pick up a clean audio feed.

After the shot was completed, I picked up the PD170 and said, what the heck, I got tape, I’ll do some pickups with this camera and burn some tape. I ended up duplicating some of the shots that I already had down with the HD camera (shooting in SD by the way). Packed up everything and headed back to do the editing.

Here’s the kicker, I looked at the carpet and tile shots that I took with the PD170 and then looked at the same items in SD that I shot with the Sony HD HVR-1VU Camera and the color and sharpness difference was unbelievable. Don’t get me wrong. The PD170 is a great 3 CCD camera for any shoot, but now I use the HD camera for all my shoots…even in HD.
I would try and upload the two cases but with the compression issues you probably would not see the difference, but as a fellow editor, it will blow you away when you see it you studio monitors.

More on the way…who else is having problems with Adobe Premiere C3 after Service Pack 1 came out?

Talk to you soon.